How To Start a YouTube Channel - Beginner’s Guide to YouTube

hey friends welcome back to the channel so i started making these youtube videos way back in 2017 and when i got started i had absolutely no idea what i was doing but this channel recently hit 2.7 million subscribers which is insane so thank you if you're a subscriber and so i thought in this video we'd break down the three-step framework for how to grow how to succeed on youtube in my humble opinion and basically it is three levels level one level two and level three and we work in between those levels and we kind of

progress through those levels over time and the first level is get going the second level is get good and the third level is get smart and then even more excitingly in between these two levels we have two choices we have choice number one and we have choice number two and so in this video we're going to go through each of the levels each of the choices timestamps down below if you want to skip around let's go for it alrighty so let's kick things off with level one which is to get going basically when you're at

level one your only objective is to just get started this is where you're breaking that barrier where you're getting out of your own way where you're just uploading videos one at a time and they're going to be really really bad they're going to be awful unless you already know how to make good videos which is coming at level 2 you will not know how to talk to a camera you're going to hate the sound of yourself on camera you're going to hate the sound of your voice you're going to think you're completely garbled you won't

be able to speak to the camera you're going to think oh my god i'm actually okay speaking to people in real life but all of a sudden when i turn the camera on suddenly it's just an absolute [ __ ] show what's going on here and the answer to all this stuff is that literally there is no way around it you literally just have to get going and so the thing that i recommend to all my beginner part-time youtuber academy students and what i'm recommending in my new skillshare class youtube for beginners et cetera et

cetera is that you just need to kind of besmirch the blank page and get over that fear of uploading that first video there's like baby steps here if you want you can upload your first video as unlisted so that no one's gonna see it and it tells you that oh uploading a video to youtube isn't that hard if you want as well and you know one thing i'd recommend is that you literally just get your phone out you shoot a video being like hey i'm starting a youtube channel here's why and you upload it and

if you really want to you can just leave it as unlisted you don't even have to publish it because no one is going to see it and then what you're going to realize once you've uploaded a video as unlisted if you're still one of those people that's a bit scared of putting themselves out there you'll realize that actually there's not that much difference between unlisted and published i could just hit publish on the video and then what you're going to realize is you hit publish on the video and no one cares no one watches the

video because you have no subscribers at this point no one cares about you as long as you don't share the link with your friends and family no one is even going to know that you started a youtube channel and this idea is incredibly liberating for people because as all of our students on the youtube academy found out the ones who were scared to put themselves out there initially 99 of the fear is before you hit publish on that first video and then 99 of the video completely disappears it's still a little bit you know the

whole talking to camera stuff the whole sound of your voice that gets better over time but you realize how much effort you were putting into just creating that barrier for yourself and just not allowing yourself to actually start this thing which involves taking a bit of a risk and putting yourself out there now another question that we get often is like do you have to make youtube videos showing your face maybe you're a bit shy on camera maybe you you think your public speaking skills are not that amazing and the answer is you don't really

have to one of my friends aaron have runs a youtube channel called mr who's the boss which is now on like 10 million subscribers he spent his first like three years on youtube making content where no one saw his face because he was scared he was going to get bullied at school but then over time he got more comfortable there and now he's like the biggest tech youtuber in europe and making a ton of money and having a great time and living the dream now at this point in the get going stage even when someone's

uploaded that first video the next question is going to be what the hell do i make videos about and my answer at this point is that it doesn't really matter we're gonna worry about that a little bit later but right now we just need to get going and so if you're a complete beginner you know there's a few video titles that are very easy to do it's very easy to do a video called why i'm starting a youtube channel in 2022. it's very easy to do a video where you talk about a favorite thing of

yours and in fact this is assignment number one that we give to students in a part-time youtube academy like talk about your favorite thing in this video i want to review this fake plant that i got from ikea that i have on my desk at all times it's very easy to do that kind of video it's very easy to do a video where you for example talk about what's in my bag or you talk about your skincare routine or you talk about your makeup routine and you don't have to do anything you can just talk

about these things that you already know you are documenting rather than creating it's pretty hard to create original content and it feels like a heavy lift but if all you're thinking about is i'm just gonna document stuff and i know my videos are gonna suck and they're gonna be awful no one's gonna no one's gonna watch them that's okay because we're still at level one where the objective is just to get going now coming back to our model at the end of level one you then have a choice to make and this is choice number

one this is a crucial choice and when it comes to choice one you really have three different options here are the three options in choice one number one is am i going to break up with youtube i have tried this youtube thing i've tried putting out a few videos out there i would say in level one maybe you make 10 videos 20 videos something like that while you're getting going your first 20 videos are in level 1 the get going stage these numbers going to vary for different people but that's a pretty reasonable ballpark i

think for me i got i made 30 videos in the get going stage before i got to stage number two and so the question is you know you've tried this thing do you want to break up with youtube that's completely okay you know you've tried out this thing as a hobby you've decided it's not for you you've realized it's too much of a heavy lift you've realized you haven't got the time you've realized your life and kids and job and family is getting in the way that's totally okay youtube is not for everyone but at

least you've tried and now you won't be filled with regrets on your deathbed thinking oh i really wish i'd started a youtube channel 50 years ago in 2022 when it was still a cool thing to do but okay let's say you don't want to break up with youtube at that point there is a choice and that is a choice of do you want to be in a casual relationship or do you want to be in a serious relationship with youtube now if you're in a casual relationship with youtube that's totally fine that's when you're thinking

you know what i'm just going to make videos whenever i feel like it i'm going to see you when i feel like it and we're going to have fun together but we're not you know i'm not seriously gonna kind of commit to this it like maybe it could go somewhere further down the line but right now life life's a bit busy i'm not looking for something serious right now i'm not able to devote somewhere between 5 and 10 or 15 hours per week to be seeing to be doing this youtube thing seriously therefore we are

going to be in a casual relationship with youtube and again that is also totally fine and when you're doing youtube casually basically you're just not being consistent you're uploading when you feel like it you're like you know maybe upload a video this week and then maybe three weeks from now and then maybe a month from now then you take a break for a few months because life gets in the way and then you upload another video this is a casual relationship you cannot expect to get any growth on youtube when you are just in a

casual relationship just like you can't expect an actual relationship to grow while it is a casual relationship this is a purely for fun thing just for funsies and it's all good and the mistake we see is people who have not yet committed to youtube who are expecting some level of growth like ah in the last six months i uploaded three videos randomly and they were about random topics and my channel's not growing yes of course your channel is not growing because you've decided you're in a casual relationship with youtube and you cannot expect any growth

when you're in that mode so that's being a casual relationship but you might over time decide you want to make it more serious or you might immediately decide you know what youtube is the one and i'm willing to turn this into a serious relationship i'm willing to devote five 10 15 hours per week i'm willing to publish videos consistently if you then join the serious relationship stage with youtube i'm really stressing this analogy now you have progressed to the get good stage so in my book generally for most people if you want to go from

get going to get good and you want to do this more than just for fun you want to do it seriously you need to make that commitment and within choice number one you need to decide i'm going to commit to youtube and i'm going to take it seriously if you don't want to take it seriously it's all good you don't need to worry about it but then you know we start to get into interesting territories when it comes to level two which is get good all right now we are at get good which is level

two of being a youtuber and the objective in level two is to get good at making videos it's to make our videos better again we cannot expect any growth on youtube when our videos are absolutely crap which is what they're going to be when we're in level one and when we don't yet know how to make videos unless you are already a professional videographer or a professional filmmaker like matt divello or peter mckinnon or people like that for most of us we are learning filming and editing and cameras and lighting and all my audio and

all this stuff we're learning it from scratch and therefore the objective of level two is to get good and broadly there are two ways of getting good the first one is quantity and then the second one is quality and my gambit is going to be most people should start with quantity we need to make lots of videos the more videos we make the better we are going to naturally get at making videos and then the more videos we make and the more we can think of like one percent improvements to those videos over time the

more we're gonna get to a point where we make actually quality videos and you might have heard the story you know the parable of the pottery class where there was this guy who's running a pottery class and he split his class into two groups one group needed to make one pot every day for 30 days and so they made 30 pots by the end of it and the other group the other half of the class just needed to make one pot over the 30-day period so at the end of the 30 days they just made

one pot and they put all their efforts into one pot so that's like there's like a quantity group and then there was a quality group and at the end of the 30 days there was a panel of judges and they decided they judged where the bets the best pots were and all of them all of the best pots came from the quantity group they it came from the group that was making 30 pots in 30 days rather than the group that spent absolutely ages 30 days on a single pot none of them had a pot

that was any good and it's basically the same vibe when it comes to youtube videos quantity has a quality all on its own the more videos you make and you think about these little marginal improvements over time the better you get at making videos there's that really cool graph in atomic habits that shows that you know one percent improvement over a year every day compounds so like one times 1.01 to the power of 365 and then you get a 37 times improvement so just by making your videos just a little bit better each time thinking

you know what let me try out this new editing trick let me try these new titles these new transitions this new background music let me change the way i approach talking to the camera let me try and be a little bit more engaging let me use my hands let me vary the pitch of my voice let me change up the way that i kind of add a joke let me add some equipment in the background i mean drink some water while i'm doing it because it makes me more comfortable filming videos we're applying these minor

modifications over time but crucially we're not trying to do them all at once each time we make a video we're just improving something small about the video so that over time as we make more videos and i think this video is you know for me this was about 50 videos so it was like 30 videos in get going 50 videos and get good and i think for me by video number 80 i was able to make good videos at this point we've got a few things so firstly like what does it take to make a

good video like what does like what does good actually mean and you know there's sort of two ways of thinking about this uh there's the standard stuff so there's you know title there's thumbnail there's hook there's like personality there's like camera presence there's editing there's music there's sound design and then there's a bunch of stuff like what is it nine writing 10 structure 11 branding and a bunch of stuff that i'm probably forgetting but basically the again the message here is that this is not easy stuff there are whole like university degrees and diploma programs

devoted to each of these things maybe not titles and thumbnails but like you can literally get a three-year university degree in just being a videographer and just being a lighting person in just being an audio engineer in just being a public speaker and yet as youtubers we have to layer all those things and this is hard this is not gonna be an easy thing it's really fun and it's a really cool skill to improve over time and getting good at making videos gives you tons and tons of skills that makes you so much more marketable

in the job world but also levels up your own personal skills gives you the ability to make cool stuff further down the line but again this is hard it takes a large amount of time and the mistake that we see beginners make even intermediate youtubers that are like is that they try and do everything at the same time and they don't recognize that it does take a large amount of quantity generally to get to a point where your videos are high quality again caveat unless you already know all this stuff and you're already a professional

filmmaker so those are the things that make up what makes like a quote good video but then how else do we define what is good in terms of videos and broadly there's like an intrinsic version of good and there's an extrinsic version of good now the intrinsic version of good is the internal compass that we have on are my videos good like i said it took me about eighty eight zero videos where i was probably around two thousand subscribers by video number eighty it took me about 80 videos for me to think you know what

actually my videos are pretty good and i think the intrinsic one is is quite important and you know the way i think about it is do your videos pass the cringe test and the cringe test is that if someone came up to you like a friend or family member or someone on the street god forbid and said hey i really like you know i watched one of your videos the other day or oh haha i can't believe you started a youtube channel i watched one of your videos how much would you cringe if you would

cringe at that it means that your videos are probably not very good whereas if you'd feel like oh it's not too bad i don't feel too too cringy about that it means your videos have passed the cringe test and now they're at least internally good enough in your mind and to be honest like over probably 95 percent of people who start youtube are making that number up but it seems accurate 95 of people who start youtube never get to the point where they think internally that their videos are good enough probably because a they're not

focusing on quantity and they're not you know crucially doing that step of one percent improvements over a large period of time to get to quality but at some point your videos will pass the cringe test and internally you'll feel proud of the video and you'll think you know what this video is actually pretty reasonable but obviously it's not good enough to just make videos that are good in our own eyes ideally we want them to be good in the audience's eyes as well this is a bit trickier because this is now where we're setting goals

that are outside our own control so i don't really like thinking about this too hard but generally we know when our videos are extrinsically good enough when we start to see our channel and our videos getting a little bit of traction so what are the things that make for a good video really it's just two things that people click on them and then people watch them that's it that's literally all it takes to make a good video and that is the million dollar the billion dollar formula of being a youtuber if you can get people

to click on your video and you can get people to watch your video you are absolutely sailing and you would you would be a billionaire thanks to youtube and that is the thing that all youtubers ultimately are struggling with how do i get more people to click and how do i get more people to watch now thankfully we do have metrics for this click is our thumbnail click through rate which youtube analytics tells us watch is our kind of watch time and retention but to be honest when your channel is small there's not a lot

you can do with the data because you just don't have enough numbers for it to be statistically like relevant and useful data the other thing you can look at is engagement so comments and generally you'll know when you start sort of getting to the point where your videos are actually good are you useful or interesting or entertaining or inspiring or engaging to someone else when you start seeing comments that oh i really like this video or this video really helped me or wow that was such a funny video that was something that was so insightful

that was so informative when you start getting those sorts of comments is when you again you have this other barometer of you know someone else other than me thinks my videos are also good but to be honest at this point i wouldn't really focus too much on the extrinsic metrics they are there and you can spend maybe five percent of your time optimizing the strategy and thinking about titles and thumbnails and market research and stuff but really our only i think for most people our main objective and certainly my main objective when i started the

youtube channel was get to a point where i'm just making lots of videos quantity i'm not thinking too hard about like what do i make videos about and like trying to hold myself back i'm committing to one or two videos per week which worked for me maybe your schedule will be different but you do need to commit to some level of consistency because this is a serious relationship not a casual one you're doing your one percent improvements and then you're making your videos slightly better over time with all these things title thumbnail hook personality camera

presence editing music sound design writing structure branding to get to the point where your your videos now pass the cringe test and you don't cringe really hard anytime someone says i watched your video because now you're internally thinking you know what this video is actually pretty reasonable and then what i would suggest going back to our three-part model at this point once you have passed the cringe test at this point we are now making choice number two now this is where it starts to get fun so fun that i've even switched my color of pen

choice number two so while choice number one was casual versus serious relationship or kind of breakup was a third option choice number two is the choice between is this a a hobby or is this a business yes that's the gambit we're gonna go for so get going level one get good level two and before we get to level three we have choice number two which in fairness it's it's like a spectrum and it's a spectrum of am i treating youtube like a hobby or am i treating youtube like a business and different people are going

to be at different levels of it to be honest i treat youtube somewhere here it's like very much on the business end but it's still a little bit like a hobby because i still want to have fun with it but uh to be honest i i treat youtube like a business i know a bunch of people who treat youtube as a hobby and that's totally okay but when you're treating like a business what i mean is that you are trying to make money from it when you're treating like a hobby you're trying to have fun

so again i know this is this this is not like a dichotomy but it's like what are you what are you focusing on money or like value to the audience etc in a way treating treating something like a business means it's sort of focused on others and treating something like a hobby is more like focused on yourself and again i'm not saying you're selfish for having a hobby you know i play the guitar as a hobby i play the piano as a hobby it's a hobby i do for myself it's a hobby i do for

fun i'm not treating it like a business i don't want to monetize my passion by monetizing the ability to play the guitar i don't wanna right now release my own songs i don't wanna do covers i don't wanna play in a pub i don't wanna do busking for the sake of money i wanna do all this stuff for fun because it like fulfills and enriches my life as a person and if you wanna do youtube for fun that's totally fine absolutely nothing wrong with that but then you don't really need to worry about level three

because level three is about getting smart and it's about treating youtube more like a business now if you treat youtube like a business you can still have fun like i'm not saying the fun is completely divorced from the business side but there is a little bit of a danger because when you start making something that you find fun into a business into work it actually can sometimes take the fun away from it like i really enjoyed making youtube videos when i was working as a doctor because it was like my escape from that and even

though i was trying to make money from it it was still fun because i didn't need it to make money now these days when my job is making youtube videos sometimes i'll be honest sometimes i wake up in the morning and i think uh i don't want to make a youtube video today then i get into it and it becomes fun and you know i've now got a team and we've got the studio we've got the office it's quite nice it's good vibes and for me treating it like a business has in fact made it

more fun but it does kind of take a little bit of the joy out of the craft when you have to make money from it so again absolutely nothing wrong with treating youtube like a hobby but i think we want to be honest with ourselves like if you're treating it like a hobby if i'm treating guitar like a hobby i wouldn't beat myself up that oh i played a song the other day and i wasn't very good if i'm treating playing playing the piano or singing like a hobby i wouldn't beat myself up if i'm

like why haven't i made a million dollars a year from singing yet i'm treating like a hobby it's a hobby whereas if i have a business now i can start to have goals that are a bit more sort of external facing a bit more thinking about what would an audience actually want and how can i treat this youtube channel a little bit more like a business and that is where we get to level three which is get smart and this is the level that people are at when they decide that they want to move a

little bit more towards the business end of the spectrum and if it's a hobby you don't need to worry about the stuff but if it's a business then here are some things that we can start to think about so let's go back to our basic model just to make sure we're on the same page level one was get going we started making our videos for me this was about 30 videos level two is getting good where we're making a bunch of videos we're committing to it doing it consistently because we're in a serious relationship with

youtube and we're improving slowly over time to get to the point where we pass the cringe test and that's when we know that internally our videos are now good and now choice number two is do we want to treat it like a business or do we want to treat it like a hobby and if we want to treat it as a business we're now go into get smart territory where we can now start thinking okay i'm being a creator i'm having fun i'm doing this kind of kind of as a hobby but i also do

want to take it seriously i want to think of it like a business now if you were running a business let's say you wanted to open up a shop a supermarket or like a local corner shop you wouldn't be able to just be like you know what i wanna i wanna sell only the products that i like i don't wanna pound it to the audience i don't care who comes in through the door i don't care about the demographics of this local area it should be about me i should sell the products i to make

if you're treating things like a business you're not going to succeed if you don't care about your audience if you don't care about your market if you don't care about what people actually want you can do that as a hobby which is which is why you know we use this thing of like hobbies are focused on yourself and what you want to do and business is more focused on others and what other people would find useful so in a way it's like what i want slash love and a business is more like what my audience

wants now again this is not a dichotomy like in an ideal world we would have this kind of venn diagram about like things i love and things my audience wants and preferably also things i can make money from and then the overlap of this would be our niche it would be the area that we're making videos that would be in an ideal world but this is all the stuff we have to start thinking about when it comes to getting smart now because i'm a fan of frameworks there are three parts to getting smart again in

my humble opinion and those three are number one workflow number two cash flow and number three outflow and this is the model for the part-time creatorpreneur which is an online course i'm working on more details on that in a few weeks month whatever um but within workflow we have strategize and systemize within cashflow we have value and we have products and with an outflow basically we have hiring and we have management mx it's medical terminology for management i'm just going to stick that there because you know it doesn't fit on this piece of paper now

i'm not going to focus too much on the cash flow and outflow parts because sort of those parts come later but let's talk a little bit broadly about workflow so you're in this getting smart category you've decided you're at level 3 of being a youtuber you now know at this point how to make good videos at least internally and now we've decided we're going to think of being a youtuber a little bit more systematically we're going to treat it a little bit more like a business and therefore we need to strategize and systemize and the

cool thing here is that there are so many concepts that we can learn from the world of business that we can then apply to our creative side hustle and those are the concepts that i've sort of learned over the last five years that i've applied to my business and also helped apply to a bunch of creators who've gone through our youtuber academy i'll get more details in the video description if you want to check it out and this is the stuff that i've gotten from reading books like marketing books mba books like executive leadership books

management books like culture books the great ceo within the millionaire fast lane traction and a bunch of other books that i've read on kindle or listened to an audible that we don't have lying around in the studio again i'm not saying you have to do this not saying youtuber needs to read business books to become successful but what i'm saying is that if you decide consciously that you want to treat your creative side hustle as more of a business there is a nice solid library you can stand on the shoulders of giants and you can

figure out what businesses have been figuring out for like decades if not hundreds of years and you can apply those to the thing that we're doing here on youtube so when it comes to strategize there are a few different things there is firstly goals there's niche there's target audience there's competitor analysis although we don't think about competitors or competitors we think of those colleagues there's your competitive advantage there's planning and there's pivoting and this is basically the syllabus of our new part-time creative printer course which is coming up there'll be a link in the video

description if you want to sign up for the mailing list or the waiting list or whatever to get some kind of discount on it but whatever basically yeah this is the sort of stuff that we have to start thinking about when we start thinking of our channel as a business like goals what are the actual goals like what do you want from this what does your dream youtube channel look like three three years from now what does it look like one year from now and you know there is that that whole there's a really good

phrase which is that plans are useless but planning is indispensable so like probably my goals for the i mean my goals for my youtube channel three years ago were very different to what it currently looks like but the fact that i was thinking slightly further ahead that i was planning ahead i was thinking like how can i evolve my content over time recognizing that i'm gonna be sort of aged out of the student market very very soon once i graduate university a few years ago therefore how can i transition my content strategy to hopefully remain

somewhat relevant over time all of these are things that i was thinking before as i realized that you know what i need to start treating my youtube channel as a little bit more of a business we come to the idea of niche and the idea of target audience this becomes really really important when we're thinking as a business and all youtubers especially like all the youtubers we've seen in our course youtuber academy um basically ask this question of how do i know what my niche is how do i know what what the hell to actually

make videos about this never gets easy it's never like abundantly obvious what you should make videos about you always think but i'm a multifaceted person and i have all these different interests like can't i just make a personality channel and yeah you can but like you know we want to be thinking a little bit more systematically about what is our niche what's our target audience what are the things that i i personally like and enjoy what are the things that i'm personally good at what are the areas in which i have a potential unfair advantage

and then once i figure that out what is the kind of audience that i want to target what are the kind of problems that they're having in their life and how can i potentially bridge that gap that bridge of transformation to solve problems for them because like we said in you know the choice when you start if you're thinking like a hobby it's totally okay to just think about yourself like what is the content i want to make because it's an artistic expression of myself but when you start thinking like a business you want to

think what is the sort of content that my target audience would want and ideally we want to balance this with the stuff that we want to make because generally on youtube if you've followed my channel for a while you can kind of tell the videos i'm excited about i'm freaking excited about this video because i freaking love talking about the topic versus sometimes we do release videos that i'm not fully excited about and people can tell it's just not nice making videos that you don't like so again ideally we want that venn diagram overlap of

stuff that me and stuff that them they're meaning the audience you know we want it to overlap as much as we possibly can then part of strategy is doing competitor analysis it's becoming an expert in your space it's knowing okay i want to talk about personal development therefore i'm going to watch hundreds of hours of content from all of the channels in the in the space that are also doing personal development content i'm going to figure out how they grew i'm going to figure out their content strategy what are they doing well what are the

areas that they can be improving in what are the interesting areas in which i can possibly stand out because as naval rabbit kant famously says and this is an amazing book by the way the almanac of naval ravicon you can escape competition through authenticity so this isn't about treating our fellow youtube colleagues as competitors because they're not really in a way youtube is nice because the rising tide lifts all the boats this is instead about thinking them as colleagues but even so we still want to understand what's going on in the space like what is

the difference between my channel and matty velas or matt my channel and thomas france and nathaniel drew and joey switcher and like elizabeth phillips and these other people who are in this like productivity type space and you know what are the people who are like adjacent to it as well you know people like you know podcasts like school of greatness or impact theory of diary of a ceo or the tim ferriss show or lex friedman what are these guys all doing what are they doing well and what are the areas in which i can stand

out and be a little bit different not necessarily trying to be better because i think i'm not generally a fan of competition and trying to be better than our fellow man but instead thinking more in terms of how can i be different how can i kind of apply my own authentic self and create my content and create my channel in a way that just is slightly different from all these other people out there now we can think in terms of competitive advantages what are the unfair advantages i have that will allow me to potentially stand

out in this space when i started my youtube channel my unfair advantage was that i was a cambridge medical student creating videos for people who wanted to become cambridge medical students i did not suddenly decide i want to become i want to do makeup tutorials i know nothing about makeup i did not decide i wanted to get into guitar or singing tutorials i did not decide i wanted to review tech because i have no unfair advantages in those spaces and so really when it comes to growing on youtube we need to be honest about like

why like why is our channel going to stand out is the unfair advantage that you've got is the advice is your is your competitive edge is your alpha is your advantage going to be just the fact that you're putting in way more hours than anyone else okay fair enough but if there are other kind of levers that you can pull for your own unfair advantages then that just makes it a lot easier to develop a strategy that like actually tactically helps you grow once we're at this point we also want to start thinking about planning

like you know quarterly planning and yearly planning and this book traction by gina wickman is absolutely fantastic for this when i first discovered this stuff it was a few years ago when i ran into a business coach who happened to recognize me because he saw my videos and the one of the first things he did with me was we came up with like a quarterly plan and i've never done quarterly planning before but suddenly doing a quarterly plan completely changed the game for my channel because it just gave us a plan i just never realized

oh [ __ ] you should probably have a plan if you want to take something seriously as a business and then there's pivoting which is when you know how do you know when stuff is failing how do you know if stuff's not working trying out new content ideas being a bit experimental with some of the content but ultimately figuring out what direction you want to go based on the data based on the response based on how you personally feel about the videos once we have figured out our strategy our next job is to try and

systemize and hear oh i don't have a physical copy of this there's an amazing book a book that completely changed my life when i read it in 2019 called the e myth revisited by michael gerber which is 100 required reading for anyone who is at level 3 of their youtube channel where you already know how to make good videos but now you want to grow and you want to do it sustainably and you want to have fun along the way you want to do it systematically and you want to treat it like a business you've

got to read the e-myth revisited and a bunch more stuff in systemizing about how to create systems and stuff how to create leverage how to kind of refactor how to sort of figure out your workflow and then like take bits of the workflow and make them a bit more efficient a bit more fun and again this is all the stuff that we're going to go over on the creative pronounce course i'm going to be making more videos about it here on this channel if you don't take the course it's totally fine uh further like over

time but to be honest at this level most people are not at this level i mean most people aren't really at level three you know for me it took me 80 to 100 videos before i go to level three so unless you've made 80 to 100 videos on your channel this stuff that i'm talking about some of it is going to be relevant but at this point we're starting to get into territory that really it does take some time to get to the stage where you need to worry about systemizing and hiring and outsourcing and

managing a team and all that fun stuff let's go back to our model level one i would suggest or at least for me my first 30 videos were all about getting going and if you're at this stage you should check out my skillshare class which is now out you can access it for free there will be a free access link in the video description if you want to check it out it's called youtube for beginners it's about how to just kickstart your channel how to create the channel how to get the cover out how to

make thumbnails look good how to shoot your first video how to get over the fear of posting how to get better on camera how to do thumbnails titles how to think about market research all of the basics around getting started with youtube getting going are in the skillshare class so you should check that out for completely free free link in the video description you can check it out i think you need to sign up to a free trial of skillshare and then if you want just between you and me you can cancel the trial after

you watch my class you don't need to pay for skillshare i do anyway because it's good they're not even sponsoring this video but yeah whatevs you should check out my skillshare class if that's a thing that you're into and you want to get going to be honest like it's not that hard you just make videos on youtube and there's tons of free stuff out there there are some amazing channels out there that give you great advice about growing your channel especially in the early days then after you've made your first 30 or so videos at

least for me you know your next 50 videos are about getting good and at this point you might like to sign up to my part-time youtuber academy um enrollment will open like we we run a live cohort three times a year if you want to check it out link in the video description but that will be kind of relevant there and if you're in the getting smart stage then part-time youtuber academy will be relevant for you but you should also check out my creatorpreneur course which is not out at the time of this recording but

it will be linked in the video description or there'll be some kind of sign up to the waiting list for the mailing list and you'll get a discount on it that is where basically the objective is once you have a creative side hustle which is doing well and you want to treat it like a business how do we apply learnings from at least me for my last three years of just like copiously reading a [ __ ] ton of business books how do we apply all of those to our creative side hustle to make it

more like a business while hopefully having fun along the way and keeping things sustainable all right so hopefully this was all helpful bit of a whistle stop tour through all of the things if you are at that beginner stage or even if you're at the intermediate or advanced stage and you want more tips for youtube check out this video over here which is my top 10 tips for aspiring or beginner youtubers and you might like to check out my skillshare class thank you so much for watching i hope this has been a semi useful video

if you're in this youtube thing it's a bit niche if you're not and you still watched it and thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving me giving me the watch time and the engagement and stuff on youtube but probably wasn't relevant to you unless you actually want to be youtuber but yeah thank you so much for watching do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already and i'll see you in the next video bye-bye and if you're still watching this and you want a ton more tips and tricks from me and my

team on how to go on youtube we actually have a brand new channel called the part-time creator academy where we create videos completely for free here on youtube about how to grow a sustainable creative business part-time so that you can like do this creative thing in a nice way anyway if you want to check that click over there or hit the link in the video description that'll be linked to a part-time creator academy youtube channel thank you so much for watching hopefully this was useful do hit the subscribe button and hopefully i'll see you in

the next video bye